Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Daniel Case/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
THE MAINLAND AFFAIRS COUNCIL (MAC) has announced the blocking of a Chinese platform that offered educational and employment opportunities to Taiwanese young people. Specifically, the MAC cited that the platform could be used to collect data from Taiwanese young people, as well as that it violated Articles 23, 33, and 34 of the Cross-Strait Act. These articles pertain to Taiwanese taking up educational opportunities, participating in Chinese political organizations, and regarding advertisements for Chinese goods and services. 2,000 companies had posted 6,000 vacancies on the platform before its blocking.
This would hardly be the first time that the Chinese government has sought to win over Taiwanese young people, seemingly aware since the 2014 Sunflower Movement that it has largely lost this demographic. As such, on several occasions in the past, the Chinese government has announced incentives intended to lure young Taiwanese entrepreneurs to start up businesses in China. Sometimes these incentives consisted of subsidies or investment opportunities, or access to Chinese projects in a range of fields, such as 5G networks, theme parks, civil aviation, and technical equipment, and use of import and export regulations in a manner similar to the access that Chinese citizens have.
One notes that more recent efforts by the Chinese government have targeted teachers; it was recently reported that the Chinese government had been offering trips that would have brought Taiwanese teachers to Xinjiang for an eight-day, seven-night trip with all expenses paid, outside of a 4,000 NT fee. The trips would have shown a sanitized version of Xinjiang, intended to dispel international media reporting on ethnic cleansing directed at Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Targeting teachers would be a clever stratagem in that, of course, teachers would educate the next generation of Taiwanese, and this would be a means of indirectly impacting young people through educators.
Still, in some way, the Chinese government would be hitting Taiwan where it hurts. One notes that, in past years, thousands of Taiwanese young people were lured to scam centers in Southeast Asia with the promise of high-paying jobs that provided food and accommodation. Such a job platform directed at Taiwanese has strong parallels, even if meant as a United Front endeavor, in taking advantage of the fact that young Taiwanese face low salaries and long working hours.
That Lai administration saw itself as in a position to block the platform reflects the Lai administration’s more aggressive overall posture toward Chinese influence operations. Nevertheless, the block can be easily circumvented with a VPN–somewhat ironic, given that Taiwan has free and open Internet while China does not, and Western social media and e-mail services can only be accessed through a VPN in China.
To date, action taken by the Lai administration against Chinese apps has mostly been confined to banning their use on official devices used by public sector employees. Among the apps banned to date are TikTok, known as Douyin in China, as well as Chinese navigation app AMap. AMap previously attracted scrutiny from Taiwanese authorities over the possibility that the app might be collecting data on the movements of regular citizens, for use by the Chinese state. This, too, of course, is a concern with the new platform blocked by the Mainland Affairs Council.
Taiwan’s investment in China has dropped substantially in recent years, given rising geopolitical tensions and stronger trade ties with the US. Nevertheless, China continues to seek means of economically pressuring Taiwan, and this would be another case in point. One notes that if trade ties between Taiwan and China are decreasing, this means that there may not be another generation of Taiwanese businessmen in China–also known as taishang. China’s actions, then, may be aimed at ensuring that there is another generation of taishang among Taiwanese young people, with the view that taishang can be counted on to reliably act as a pro-China voter bloc in Taiwan.